


liminal

by ishka



Category: Free!
Genre: Alternate Universe, Drama, Gangs (background), M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-15
Updated: 2017-08-15
Packaged: 2018-12-15 14:23:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11807766
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ishka/pseuds/ishka
Summary: “Do you know how hard it is to really disappear,” Sousuke says without a question’s inflection. “And yet here you are. Why the fuck would they send you?”“No one sent me. I’ve been looking on my own the entire time.”The last of the sun chokes out then, and the countryside goes dark. That Sousuke turns his head slowly to threaten Haru directly just as it happens is a matter of isolated coincidence, and not one of a series of them that have turned Haru into something of a religious stormchaser in this intervening two year search. It’s what he tells himself these days anyway, as the supernatural explanation is a thing of hysteria woven together by a mind seeking answers for too long.“Don’t lie to me, Nanase.”





	liminal

**Author's Note:**

> i could try to explain how this fic came to be and why it's weird, but there's no fun in that.
> 
> update: please listen to [this amazing fucking song](http://ingridbeast.tumblr.com/post/168623367647/storm-chasers-after-what-seems-like-forever-ive) inspired by this fic!

It’s only when Haru tips his chin up and towards the dark, gunmetal gathering of storm clouds and soundlessly mutters _he’s not coming_ , that he does. He hears it long before he sees it, goosebumps rise on his forearms in response to the subtle disruption of storm static barreling west from a kilometer down the road.

The dry season’s come and gone and done its best to bake the life out of everything. It’s that verdant, muggy peak of late summer, when the heavy stench of earth and oil drudges up after rolling rains and reprieval’s evening breeze fights against the sensation of submergence, courtesy the thick humidity. Now it’s all overgrowth and insects, flourishing and invasive and ever arrogant, as soon autumn will creep in with the abandonment of the sun, and all of it will wither into decay no matter how tall the vines climb or how boastful the cicadas screech.

It’s all Haru’s been able to think about stranded out here in the middle of nowhere. Small talk with himself about the weather while his clothes soak slowly through with sweat. He’s increasingly peppered with gory remains of all the mosquitos he’s smacked out of this world, as he gave up cleaning his skin of it over an hour ago. Relentless fucks. It’s this or he sits in the car with the doors closed and the windows rolled up, which only serves to ensure he makes it out of today resembling something of a poached egg. No thanks.

Mostly he’s grateful he won’t have to stand out in the storm, and the rest of the inconveniences are quickly forgotten by it. Nature’s response to that thought is a indignant low rumble and the first drops of rain, somehow falling out of the part of the sky that’s still clear and bright. It threatens to get him next time, and Haru knows fate will make good on that promise one way or another. Haru counts: one, two, three, four, five, six. Lightning.

Haru’s three-hours-later rescue crests the top of the horizon line now. It’s rustbucket red, either by design or by genuine oxidization, and contrasts unpleasantly with the various cooling greys and rich greens blanketing the area. It’s appropriately out of place. Doesn’t belong, but Haru’s glad it’s there.

Haru promised himself he wouldn’t hide. He pulls the brim of his tattered baseball cap down over his eyes just the same, and anchors his gaze to the asphalt, keeping it there even after the dilapidated tow truck comes to a stop just in front of his car on the shoulder of the road. When the cab door opens and slams shut rending a high whine from the metal, and booted footsteps grind over gravel towards him, everything but his knees (which shake with adrenaline) lock up in paralysis. He sweats more than he was before, a steady rivulet runs from his hairline down to the tip of his nose and falls in steady plops to the road he’s glued to.

The lack of greeting at a distance implies suspicion, and the silence shoring up between Haru and the driver mirrors the silence leading up to the storm now dangerously close to snapping overhead. Not a steady wake of silence, but a piling tower of it scheduled for demolition.

He looks up at the same time he peels his cap off, and sees a stranger he knows so intimately, and forgets more every day.

Sousuke’s jaw is set hard enough to have undergone a partial fossilization, and has likely been that way since he saw Haru’s outline in the distance, hat or no. The tendons in his neck swell and his nostrils flare. His knuckles are white with tension and his folded arms flex against restraint, a primal urge to cold clock Haru in the center of the face or strangle him, either or, barely contained. And yet his eyes stay calm and detached, true to his legend. They’d call him a typhoon before they’d call him a traitor, all made up of decimated brawn encasing a tranquil center.

Sousuke always hated the moniker— so did Haru, too dramatic, too cartoonish— but it’s all that comes to mind now that the same steady eye pins him down and serves as the only buffer between a steel-toed boot to the ribs and a fist-shattered skull.

“Fuck no,” Sousuke lurches with disgust, and turns on his heel in the the same breath.

Haru’s body allows him to move again, immobility curse dispelled along with the silence. “Wait,” he calls. “S— Yamazaki.”

By the time he catches up, Sousuke’s back in his cab and slamming the door again. Haru pounds a fist on the metal, then ambles up the single step and smacks the window flat-palmed as the engine turns over and combusts to life. Sousuke doesn’t look at him, eyes dead ahead while he levers the shift down into drive. The truck lurches forward with its diesel gargle and drowns out Haru’s curse when he’s forced to hop off and back before momentum tosses him off anyway.

It’s a slow turn around for such a long truck on such a narrow road. Haru works his way around the front of the cab, careful not to put himself in front of it when Sousuke’s not in reverse because he’s genuinely unsure that Sousuke wouldn’t take an opportunity like that in the heat of the moment, and over to the passenger side. Sousuke sees what he’s doing too late, and his desperate launch for the door lock is too slow. Haru jumps up onto the step just enough out of the way to open the passenger side door and gets a leg in. Sousuke slams on the brakes, throwing Haru off balance and nearly back onto the road, but he holds on and climbs into the cab fueled by spite for Sousuke making this more difficult than it needed to be already more than anything.

“Seriously?” Haru sighs, collapsing more than sitting into the bucket seat. He’s flushed beet red with exertion at this point and tents his damp shirt out at the collar to cool down.

“Get the fuck out.”

“No. I need a ride to a garage.”

“Call someone else.”

“I called you specifically.”

“And what part of _don’t contact me again_ wasn’t clear?”

“The _don’t_ part.”

Sousuke still won’t look at him. The worn vinyl coat of the steering wheel protests audibly as Sousuke chokes it out and twists it in his double-handed, ten-and-two grasp. If Sousuke planned on removing Haru by force, he would’ve done it by now, either by threat of the holstered utility knife at his hip or the .38 under his seat, assuming he’s still a creature of habit despite it all.

“Do you know how hard it is to really disappear,” Sousuke says without a question’s inflection. “And yet here you are. Why the fuck would they send you?”

“No one sent me. I’ve been looking on my own the entire time.”

The last of the sun chokes out then, and the countryside goes dark. That Sousuke turns his head slowly to threaten Haru directly just as it happens is a matter of isolated coincidence, and not one of a series of them that have turned Haru into something of a religious stormchaser in this intervening two year search. It’s what he tells himself these days anyway, as the supernatural explanation is a thing of hysteria woven together by a mind seeking answers for too long.

“Don’t lie to me, Nanase.”

“They don’t stop me from looking,” Haru clarifies. “But they didn’t send me.”

The truth only makes the world rumble. Haru counts: one, two, three, four. The road flashes white.

“I don’t want to hear what you have to say. For the last time: get out.”

“I’m asking for one ride. My car—”

“Rin’s car that you stole,” Sousuke translates.

“—Won’t start. Doesn’t matter whose it is. One ride, nearest garage.”

They both know Sousuke’s the local tow and garage both. Haru knows additionally he bought the truck and business, and took over the grounds and building lease from a withered and widowed old man who passed away suddenly a month after selling it all to him. A month into what he thought would be a long and happy retirement, after a full time career as the town mechanic like his father before him, searching for years for someone to take the burden of dependability off of his long stiff and arthritic hands. What Sousuke doesn’t know is that he was going to travel to the Caribbean first, and that it was a “broken heart what got him, not a stroke”, according to his only daughter. Chatty girl.

“Why won’t it start?”

“Because it’s out of gas.”

Sousuke chuckles in disbelief of what Haru assumes to be his dazzling audacity, and leans over his lap without touching him at all somehow to open the door for him. He uprights, one arm leaning lazy over the steering wheel in a change of tactic. It’s a fake show of comfort. Haru knows every inch of Sousuke, including the corners of him where he embargoes tensions he’s trying to keep hidden. “There’s a station back up the road ten kilometers you would’ve driven right by. Better start walking; looks like it’s gonna rain.”

There’s a tire iron on the floor of the cab. Haru could keep talking and get his way, eventually. But he hates talking when there are actions yet to be taken that could shave some time off things. He’s quick to swipe the iron up before Sousuke gets to it, much to Sousuke’s frustrated growl over being outpaced once more.

Outside, it’s sprinkling inconsistently and the temperature is rapidly dropping. Haru walks purposefully back to the stranded car, picking up his gait for both necessary momentum and to stay ahead of Sousuke who’s hurrying after him, bitching unintelligibly about his stolen tool. Haru angles the iron flathead side down, sharp corner centered, and uses the energy of his walk to power one decisive unrestrained thrust into the sidewall of front tire of the car. Then, to bury any protests about spares before they may arise, pierces the rear one for good measure. Air rushes out in a loud, sharp hiss from each.

Sousuke comes to a hard stop and gapes, looking like a trout launched at an invisible wall.

“Now I have a flat. Give me a ride.”

 _“For fuck’s sake!”_ Sousuke bellows over another round of rolling thunder.

Haru counts: one, two. The sky splits in half.

“I could’ve just shown up at the garage,” Haru says. “I know where it is. This way you get paid for your time.” He tosses the iron forward to tumble and skid across the asphalt, coming to a stop near Sousuke’s feet. “And unless you have another million to spend on another new identity, you should probably just give me what I’m asking for. Maybe I’ll leave you alone after this, and maybe Rin doesn’t need to know I found you. It was just another dead end.”

The threat does to Sousuke as Haru intended. He falls quiet, he’s scared. Somewhere deep down, beneath the fifty tons of oppressive humidity and bone-deep exhaustion brought on by a two year search snuffing out what’s left of his patience, Haru feels bad for having to play it like that.

“You’re a piece of shit,” Sousuke levels scathingly. “How many more times are you going to ruin my life before you’re satisfied?”

Haru shrugs one shoulder while reaching for his back pocket with his other arm, then tosses Sousuke the keys without warning to a predictable catch. “I’m not here to do that. I’ve been done with that for a while now.” He doesn’t care for the way Sousuke looks at him while he walks back towards the truck to wait for his tow. Like Haru put him in this position, like Sousuke’s ever been a victim in any of this. So he pauses in front of Sousuke and adds, so he’s clear: “You knew what the risk was.”

The clouds hold their sorrows only a beat longer, released as a sheet alongside Haru’s held breath. If Sousuke summons the thunder, Haru summons the rain. 

 

* * *

 

It’s an ugly thing.

Not that Haru has anything to compare it to. Maybe his assessment is unfair and premature, as Haru can only see what of it peaks over Sousuke’s t-shirt collar since he’s removed his jacket, and only when Sousuke’s conscious effort to keep his back hidden from Haru slips for a moment. Like now, as he’s distracted with clearing his car bay of loose tools and debris associated with what he mumbled to be his “project car”, some Nineteen-Eighty-Who-Cares Pontiac Something-or-Other he had to finagle into neutral and roll back out into the downpour manually to make room for Haru’s car. Rin’s car. Whatever. He tracks an obscene amount of sloshy mud back inside, and pays it no mind. Neither does Haru, focused as he is on three visible centimeters of gnarled scar tissue.

Done with the swap, Sousuke stands between a messy shop table and the car with guarded crossed arms well out of Haru’s reach. “Smells like wet dog.”

“Really?” Haru muses. “I was thinking it was more like roasting pig.”

Sousuke glowers at him, harder than he already had been by default. “Classy.”

“You’ve never given a shit about class, least of all when you’re with me.”

Haru dared to dream that, given enough quip, Sousuke might recall those memories Haru’s lost and betray his stalwart animosity in exchange for a smirk, even an eyeroll on days Haru felt optimistic about how this might go. But Sousuke isn’t moved to anything, and his expression sticks as serious and cold as a dead war general’s hanging portrait. It ties together Sousuke’s apparent newfound love for denim, and his disavowment of a regular shave, into one cohesive image of rugged reclusivity.

“I’ll make the call today, but won’t be able to get tires until tomorrow,” Sousuke responds. “There’s a motel another kilometer up the road.”

“Kicking me out again?”

He shrugs. “Had your chance on the way up to talk. You didn’t take it. And I would’ve kicked you out anyway regardless. So pick the arrogance out of of you fuckin’ ears for once and listen: _get the fuck out._ Considering all _this—_ ” He gestures around the room and beyond, “ _—_ is a problem you made _for_ me that I am now responsible for fixing, it is more than a fair demand.”

Haru sighs. Sousuke can smell it on him, that specific mix of dust and rain that hid Haru’s intentions then, and hides them now. Haru’s lying, not entirely, but just enough. After all he’s done he would lie again. Sousuke’s mistake is ever believing Haru was as good as him.

He wipes his palms of grit and grime on his pants in a sorry display of the sort of transparency that’s always been a challenge for him to wield. “It’s more about what I want you to show me, rather than about what I want to say.”

Sousuke snorts and folds his arms tighter. Increasingly protective of himself. Nervous. In all ways, he can’t hide from Haru like Haru can hide from him. “Of course. And if I won’t show you? You’ll what? Call Rin over and let him maim my other side? Maybe call him in to watch instead, right? That’s more your M.O. Or does the board need to get together to vote on who doles out torture? I forget.”

Perhaps it’s the day catching up with him, or two years catching up with him, or the direct address of the darkest thing Haru keeps the light from, but Haru takes a step forward and it’s less a physical gesture and more a weary submission to this fucking game Sousuke insists on playing. “Sousuke,” he begins with all the earnestness he can conjure, “personally, I’d sooner ask you to choose a bullet before I did that to you again. But I— and Rin, and Makoto— will never apologize for convincing them to let you go after you betrayed us like you did. So you can give up on that.”

 _“Us?_ ” Sousuke laughs so dry it’s closer to a cough. “ _Them_. We weren’t them. It was for you.” Something in him gives and softens as he reaffirms himself: “It was for you.” The hollow longing of it catches Haru off guard after what’s been over an hour of climbing up thick steel plates only to be caught on barbed wire. Hollow in a sense that Sousuke has no delusions it won’t stay that way, not in the sense it can be made whole. “Stop telling yourself you weren’t the reason for all of it.”

Outside, the storm rages on, stronger than it was five minutes ago. There’s a roof leak that’s since started beyond Haru’s perception until this point, falling in a fastidious pattering in the same pin-sized spot halfway between them. The audible _pap, pap, pap_ is louder than both the combined howling winds rattling the tin siding of the garage and incessant thunder slamming offbeats into his pulse.

“Your biggest mistake was believing that. Everything after it? Damage control,” Haru answers automatically. This tap Sousuke’s twisting at too quickly must be shut off without remorse. For his sake, and for Haru’s control over his conscience. “Now show me what I did to you.”

Sousuke doesn’t budge. “What good does it do you to see it?”

A detached morbid fascination comes to mind reactively, but Haru has the sense to bite his tongue over it. Haru is not marked like a leper. Haru is still intact and unmarred, so many years gone by that the black ink has bled and blurred and turned towards that old greenish-blue. Sousuke’s tattoo however, never confined him in quite the same way as it did the rest of them. He complained about how it itched and itched years after it had healed. He always kept it covered in daylight, never proud of what he did in the name of it. When they fucked, it was always face to face, or if Haru refused to look at him, he wouldn’t fuck Haru at all.

The only time he’d expose it to Haru was when it was too hot to sleep otherwise. Haru often spent his summer hours, when insomnia accepted his wakeful sacrifice and made a transient god of him, pressing his fingertips into the spaces between the lines, and watching the ink move and morph restlessly away from his touch. Never settled, anxious and misplaced.

Sousuke should never have shown it to him. Maybe then Haru wouldn’t ultimately have had to be the one to free him of it. When Haru was tasked to rid him of it, the ink did not recoil from the flame like it did his fingertips. It yielded, seeking release.

“I’m forgetting you,” Haru says as his thoughts ignite at the corners and burn inwards, curling and charred, and yet more of Sousuke turns to ash. “It’s a little bit easier every day to live with it. But I don’t want to forget what I took from you. I want to see what I did before I forget everything else. I think you’ll agree it’s all I deserve to remember.”

Haru gave up making sense of his reasoning shortly after finding it in a gutter. No good answers come from there, Rin warned him. But when has Rin ever had to look anywhere other than directly in front of him for what he wanted?

“Showing you some shitty scar is pointless,” Sousuke answers after a beat too long to be flippant, terse and clipped.

Haru blocks out the rest of what he says. He shoves it into the sealed dark where the flames eat no oxygen, before the words can fully form in his mind. It’s all a bottle of cola he shook too hard that he recaps in a panic as soon as the foam surges towards the top.

But the words erupt and find him with a vengeance in the form of pebbled hail, buffeting his sore shoulders and sharply eroding away the day from the rest of him. Each tiny miserable ball of ice is another repetition carved into his body, as he marches his one kilometer walk up the road to the motel:

“It has nothing to do with what you took from me.”

 

* * *

 

Rin asks him how this trip is going, ever hopeful.

Haru tells him there’s no one here worth mentioning, and the whole place smells like a gas canister upturned into a campfire.

Makoto asks how the weather’s held up, ever ulterior.

Haru waits the full night and well into a purple dawn for the storm to ease to a drizzle before he answers, to keep from lying outright.

A fine layer of dust blankets every corner of this town. Haru writes his name on the dirty window of his room.

 

* * *

 

Haru doesn’t dream about what he did.

Truth be told, he doesn’t think about it either. Not in the sense that he doesn’t want to relive it (he doesn’t) and so he chooses to ignore it (he does), but in the sense that his days are so busy, and today is so far removed from the day before it, there simply isn’t room in between the procedural A to B to C for a thicket of shit that goddamn tangled to exist and leave time left over to get everything else done.

The less he thinks about it, the fewer days it cripples him. The less he thinks about it, the more he forgets.

Once Makoto told him, after Haru asked no one in particular how long he’d feel this way, that no one forgets the things trauma sets in bone, even when the rest of those soft cartilage details decay over time. Haru’s left with a permanent ringing in his ears tonally not unlike the highest pitch Sousuke’s voice can reach, dragged out of him only by the rawest rip of anguish. Haru doesn’t eat pork anymore; it’s either the distinct charred smell hitting too close to home or the poignant reminder of birthday dinners long gone, he can’t decide.

Did it storm that night too?

That much, Haru’s forgotten totally. He only remembers the storms they watched together in reverent silences off a covered balcony, attached to a house Sousuke didn’t belong in among the family Haru chose over him. He remembers how Sousuke favored weight on his left leg when he slouched over the railing for a feel of the chilly damp haze but not too much, and how Haru favors his right, and how they’d bump hips when they took up position in a storm watcher’s roost he never agreed to meet at until it was routine, forgetting each time that benign antipatico. Annoying until the day that it wasn’t, and Haru discovered their crooked, undisciplined hips fit together just acceptably so.

Sometimes Haru remembers these things after he is resigned to having forgotten them for the better, and then allows the thought that he lost more than Sousuke ever fucking did or could ever fucking dream of. And he is angry with him, he wants Sousuke to relive it in the way that they all must: unspoken of, never mentioned, besides when one of them overhears a hushed _you don’t want to end up like him._ He wants Sousuke to know his selfish dreaming cost them all more than can ever be recovered, because at least Sousuke left it behind, and was not the one left behind himself.

Asking Sousuke to bear his shame is as much a punishment for Sousuke as it is an answer for Haru. Finding him when he didn’t want to be found, when he truly wanted to be left alone, and asking him to humiliate himself again as a symbol of their grief is all a calculated move, isn’t it? It’s sinister. It’s spiteful. It’s emotional. It’s

A word Haru can’t own. Not in this line of work. Sousuke is free to suffer from it now, but not Haru.

He steps on a shard of littered bottle glass; it snaps in half beneath his sneaker and brings him to a stop. He’s wandered the town all day, deliberated on his memory fragments and paused to ask himself how many old shrines and thatched roofs constitute a village as opposed to a town when he needed to take a break and think about something else.

There is no sign of Sousuke, in an immediate and meta sense of the idea. Nothing in this town holds his presence, his echo, his shadow— _him_. His domain rests just on the edge of the boundary leading in, one foot out the door at all times. The foods sold here are not his foods, the people and their predisposition towards one-hundred sunny starry-eyed _good mornings_ before ten are not his people. No excessive commercialism, no shameless hedonism, no hazy, dodgy corners bathed in tacky neon. No secret 2 AM cigarettes, no blatant 3 PM cigarettes, no cedar colognes, no middle of the road lagers. Not even a _it’s a strip club but it has good yakibuta_ within a day’s drive.

A shiver seizes Haru’s spine. There’s little mystery now why it took so long to find him; Haru never thought to take a closer look at the sorts of places Sousuke shouldn’t be until he combed through all the places he expected him to be first.

Part of not wanting to be found, Haru figures.

He knows he’s walked the full town over and back down the road to the garage without needing to look up to confirm it. It’s late afternoon already, overcast but calm so far and just as humid and warm as the day before, and he hasn’t heard anything about the car. By the other vehicles now on the dirt lot that weren’t there yesterday, Haru gets the feeling he isn’t Sousuke’s priority, so long as he stays out of sight.

His phone yields no evidence to the contrary, clear of all inquiry, besides a single text that’s pinged in the interim since he last looked:  _when are you coming home?_

 _later,_ he answers, _eventually._

Haru can see Makoto drumming anxious fingertips along the nearest polished surface, double tapping his phone to wake it every thirty seconds lest he miss Haru’s desperately sought after response. He sits alone in the dining room when he’s anxious, and counts the _tock_ on the grandfather clock to stay level. By Haru’s measure then, Makoto hasn’t moved an inch since Haru set out to follow what would be his final lead three days ago.

_i’m sorry to rush you haru, but it’s getting difficult to cover for you._

Haru sends the response he already had typed out and ready to go: _then don’t._

Makoto falls silent. He doesn’t beg Haru to come back anymore. Rin long since let Haru know his compounding recklessness, and any of the resultant consequences, are his own problem (and continues to lie for him anyway).

Distant low chatter reaches his ears. On the lot, Sousuke emerges from the garage, walks a customer to a car, and shakes his hand with a salesman’s grasp near the driver side door. Haru recognizes it as the project car and finds it odd this development makes him frown, but nevertheless it does.

The man drives away with his new prize, passing Haru standing on the shoulder of the road and leading Sousuke’s attention right to him. They hold a mutually passive stare, which is a step above Sousuke’s prior aversion, until Sousuke turns and walks back inside without so much as a middle finger tossed in Haru’s direction.

Haru follows.

“If I wanted some self-centered moody asshole following me around at a creepy distance, I’d get a cat,” Sousuke greets with his back turned to Haru, pre-occupied with breaking down a shipping box which held a case of oil filters.

“It’s not a bad idea.”

Sousuke frisbee throws the flattened box in the general direction of a large trashcan, and turns around to address him properly. “Fuck off. It’s not done.”

“Why’d you sell your project?”

“Gotta start saving up money again because of you. Maybe get out of Japan this time.”

Haru rolls his eyes. “I’m not actually going to tell Rin where you are. You know that was a bluff.”

“It’s not like he’d come anyway.”

“Probably not.”

Sousuke scowls.

“He hates how distracted you’ve made me,” Haru goads, bouncing a playful eyebrow. “Where have I heard that before?”

As it leaves Haru’s mouth, it takes a dive bomb for the floor. Sousuke steels, eerily so. Haru drives his heels into the ground and locks his legs, unsure of what to expect and untrustworthy of his knees and wholly unsurprised by now when all of this happens just as the sunlight streaking through the unsealed edges pulls away and falls behind a wall of clouds.

“Why are you still here?” Sousuke asks. “Why did you come here?”

“It’s just where I ended up.”

“To shoot the shit, right? To fuck around like you didn’t do what you did, like my life is all some cute fucking sideshow to you? Nevermind me, what I have to go through, just looking at you again.”

There’s a snap of silence Haru recognizes as a point of no return, where Sousuke buckles and Haru buckles and the room floods with the fermented, viscous mutual resentment they’ve been tamping down and grinding their teeth over.

“You lied to me.”

“You abandoned us.”

Sousuke’s legendary composure shatters into a million pieces long enough for him to sweep two heavy arms down the shop table from one end to the other, sending the neglected paperwork, the ubiquitous mechanic’s tools, the eclectic assortment of half-full mugs, the junk bins, and a laptop all sailing violently off the surface and initially towards Haru. Sousuke’s predictable last second adjustment, one small pivot through a center of clarity in his swirling fury diverting the clutter out of Haru’s trajectory and just off to the side of him, is why Haru doesn’t so much as flinch.

Ceramic fragments and pens skitter as far as the length of the garage. The laptop cartwheels off its corners but lands in one piece near Haru’s foot over a bed of assorted and scattered tacks and screws. Papers flitter down through the plumes of unsettled dirt. None of it touches him.

Sousuke’s chest heaves, his adrenaline drains, and his arms hang limp at his sides. He says nothing and makes no move to explain himself, but he doesn’t need to. Something cut him in the chaos; a thin red line split from the middle of his forearm to the center of the back of his hand beads blood. The sight momentarily mesmerizes Haru. Despite any and all of the injuries Sousuke sustained back then, he never once broke skin and bled. Broken bones, bruising, or in Haru’s direct experience, cauterization. But never blood.

“What the fuck was I supposed to do, Haru?”

His eyes find Sousuke’s, torn from his wound, but the line of the cut stays burned into his vision and divides Sousuke in half. He’s dizzy. The sight of it, and the hypocrisy of Sousuke’s question, churns bile up his throat from the depths of an empty stomach.

“You?” the room asks as the wind howls through the gaps and carries it up and away off Haru’s tongue. “ _You?_ What were _you_ supposed to do?”

Sousuke grinds his words through his teeth. “I had nothing after you fucked me over and you still managed to leave me with less. I had to run.”

“And how lucky you are,” Haru spits unevenly, “to get away with nothing when I was left to struggle with everything.”

“You had a choice!”

“They are not a choice! They are my family!” Haru shuts his eyes, and draws deep through his nose. His lids are heavy when he opens them again, and he sways on his feet while his skeleton sags. In spite of it all, Sousuke’s taken an unconscious step forward in the interim, and a stern worry sits on his brow. “They were yours, too,” he continues quieter. “And you can deny it and hide it from me forever but you carry the proof on your back and whoever you turn on next will see it.”

And whether or not it was what he wanted to say, it was what Sousuke needed to hear.

Sousuke nods once, twice, as he walks backwards as unsteady and dazed as Haru feels. “Okay. Yeah. Okay, Haru,” he stutters to fill the space, a seismic pressure building behind him. The thick and angry heat rising off his skin quickens Haru’s breath in equal parts nostalgia and anticipation. “Get out. Go. You need to leave.”

If he answers, it dies before it lives. The downpour carries Haru back on a mobius roll to a dirty motel room, and dumps him into the bathtub.

 

* * *

 

Haru’s gasps crackle in his lungs, clear, clean snaps cold and dry and static; his veins backwash with agony.

Sousuke brings the storm in with him through an unlocked door, thunder under his spine, his hips, his thighs. A premonition of danger that never happens. Haru is the rain on his skin, loud and torrential. He is an excuse of temporary blindness, wrapping cars around trees.

It’s explosive, it’s unkind. There is only grace to be found in the haphazard strobe of lightning connecting them through the dark. It reveals that steady, unbreakable gaze anchoring on Haru’s eyes, and sinking down to his lips, and fuck him— _fuck him—_ for guiding Haru by gentle fingertips into the past, to a time when this meant something.

Haru arches and he curls and he digs his nails deep into scar tissue, remembering so intimately where it begins and where it ends in the center of the small of Sousuke’s back. He remembers where it burned the worst, he remembers what it sounded smelled and looked like long after Sousuke couldn’t. He always will, and now he knows what it feels like too, all raised and uneven and damaged where smooth and taut muscle used to ripple seamlessly beneath his hands.

He doesn’t draw blood, because Sousuke never bleeds, and the skin here is too thick now to superficially wound. In the end Haru gets his revenge, and Sousuke is forced to relive betrayal through touch, as Haru maps every unpaved plane with a ruthlessly tender stroke and a chilling lack of remorse. He prays for it to stop, but Haru doesn’t answer him. Haru is a transient god, leaving more destruction in his wake by his hands than ever before.

And only when Sousuke chokes on too much and won’t look him in the eye anymore, does Haru not allow him to get away from it. Why should he be allowed to force Haru onto his knees, and why should he be allowed to mourn what he lost, when Haru is not given the same mercy? They fuck face to face, or they don’t fuck at all. He holds Sousuke right where he is and watches him burn all over again.

Through the heavy, wet stench of a restless summer, through the displaced layer of dust sticking a taste of desolation on the outline of every kiss, Haru is shown the fear the comes with remembering.

“Come with me,” Sousuke pleads of him once more.

This time, Haru will.

 

* * *

 

The car is on the lot the following day, turned out to face the road for an easy pull out.

“No charge,” Sousuke tells him, an empty tin can over his tone. The tire iron from the other day rests over his shoulder, an unspoken threat in anyone else’s hands but his.

The mud is so thick now Haru’s shoes stuck with every step on the way over. If it rains any more, he heard at the bar of a spectacularly out of place diner over the first meal he’d had in nearly two days, the town will float away. Haru thinks of lying down on his back, and waiting for it to carry him away too.

“Will you leave?”

Sousuke looks off into nowhere. “Can’t. Maybe. I don’t know.”

Haru waits for his keys or for the flood at the end of the world, whichever happens soonest, and it proves a close call.

“On the visor,” Sousuke finally answers.

He doesn’t believe he can get his leaden feet free of the mud, and besides Rin would kill him if he tracked it into the car. But there’s nothing else to say, and he’s needed back home, back where he’s wanted and back where he belongs. He sighs and looks up at the drumming of thunder he’s come to expect. It will storm again, the sky says, so long as he stays here.

Wherever Sousuke rumbles, he is always measureable seconds from Haru, even if there are too many seconds between them to chase after in a day, or even two years. Haru will follow. Nothing supernatural about it. This fate awards him no comfort.

One, two, three, four, a pane of glass shatters, and startles him out of his count.

There are violent, jagged edges where the driver side window used to be whole, and a tire iron newly spiked down deep into the ground. Sousuke folds his arms and shifts his weight to the left while Haru makes sense of it.

“It’ll take a few days to fix.”

Haru looks between two dead ends, and chooses the bigger lie.

**Author's Note:**

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